DPLA: Digital Virginias is now a DPLA Hub. “We are pleased to announce the launch of a new service hub, Digital Virginias, which offers more than 58,000 items for research and exploration. Digital Virginias, created by organizations from both Virginia and West Virginia, is the newest hub to join the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). Originally a content hub, the University of Virginia has now joined with regional partners George Mason University, William & Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Tech, and West Virginia University to create a combined set of historical materials for the region.”

EOS: Launching an Accessible Archive of Environmental Data. “… emerging community repositories are enabling scientists to easily archive and publish data with essential metadata as part of the scientific workflow. These repositories increasingly serve a critical role in enhancing data sharing and use. A new data archive seeks to play this role for the U.S Department of Energy’s (DOE) environmental science community. The new archive, called Environmental Systems Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE), preserves, expands access to, and improves usability of data from the DOE’s research in terrestrial and subsurface environments.”

Nieman Journalism Lab: Local public meetings are a scrape and a tap away, on City Bureau’s Documenters tool. “Public meetings — now there’s an app for that. We’ve seen relationships between news organizations and news consumers expand from tossing in a few bucks for a subscription to chipping in a few more for the journalistic mission to even volunteering their services in support of the news cause. City Bureau’s Documenters program has taken another tack, coaching and paying $15/hour to residents to attend and record notes from public meetings to build a stronger public record — and asking volunteer civic coders to help construct its scraping system. Now its tool for scraping, tracking, and documenting meetings is centralized and accessible for anyone else who wants to use it — but the journalists are still trying to figure out the best way to incorporate it into newsroom workflows.”

TechCrunch: Google Assistant is coming to Google Maps today . “We’ve known for a while now that Google Assistant (the company’s voice-powered AI, à la Siri or Alexa) would eventually be built right into Google Maps. They announced as much at Google I/O 2018, noting at the time that they were aiming for a summer launch. It didn’t happen by summer, but Google says it’s happening today. An update should be rolling out shortly, enabling Assistant within Google Maps on both Android and iOS.”

Engadget: Twitter will test new conversation features out in the open. “Twitter is launching a new program to let users reshape how conversations on its site look and feel, the company announced today in an interview with Engadget at CES 2019. The idea is for users to try out new organization and context features with their followers, such as the status updates and ‘ice breaker’ tweets we saw being tested last year, which are designed to encourage people to talk to each other. ”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Mashable: Mark Zuckerberg reveals his New Year’s resolution. “Mark Zuckerberg knows he has some work to do. The Facebook CEO had a rough 2018, both personally and professionally, with lawmakers turning on his social-media baby and scandal after scandal after scandal. But he’s ready to turn that all around. Following his long-established tradition of declaring annual ‘personal challenges,’ Zuckerberg announced on Jan. 8 that’s he’s figured out how to do it: by hosting public discussions about all the problems Facebook has helped to create.” Gosh, the UK wanted to have a public discussion with him but he didn’t show up.

UPI: Kids love Queen: How social media, YouTube keep classic rock alive. “The success of Golden Globe-winning Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody has rocketed the music of Queen back into the popular zeitgeist, but evidence suggests the band and its classic rock contemporaries might owe much of their enduring appeal to the influence of social media.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Motherboard: I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone. “T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Civicist: Missing: A Digital Playbook For Local Elected Officials. “In just the last two weeks, newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has gained half a million new Twitter followers, zooming from 1.6M to 2.1M. On Instagram, another platform where she excels at sharing interesting glimpses of her life as an activist-turned-newly-successful-politician, Ocasio-Cortez now has 1.6M followers, putting her in the top ranks of politicians using the platform world-wide…. For Ocasio-Cortez, this is all doing wonders for her national political profile and undoubtedly will add to her ability to influence current debates. But should we hold her up as a model?” Good afternoon, Internet…

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